Information

Manuscript

Quick select

VIB - Version 0.4

This is VIB, the Voynich information browser.

This web site is not intended to give you an introduction to the Voynich manuscript. It you are looking for an introduction, look at the links. The best introductional text is the Voynich site of René Zandbergen, which seems to be the best source of general information on the Voynich manuscript.

This web site is an easy-to-use information browser, based on the transcriptions and the comments in the interlinear archive of Voynich manuscript transcriptions in EVA, as edited by Jorge Stolfi.

The transcription archive contains a lot of information and the historical and the modern transcriptions, collected by a great research. If you want to work seriously in research or decipherment of the Voynich manuscript, you need it. But it is just a large plain text file, easy to parse by a program, but heavy to read for a human reader.

VIB extracts most of these information and displays them in an easy readable and easy navigatable HTML format for each page of the manuscript. If they are available, VIB allows the inclusion of images - which helps the reader in understanding the context of the information.

VIB Features

Overview

Extracted from the transcription file, the basic informations for each page are displayed in a table. You can get a verbose page description with comments and transcriptions by clicking on the page-number.

Images

If images are installed on this site, you can preview them in a thumbnail view. By clicking on a thumbnail, you get the page description.

Quick selector

If you know the page, you want informations about, you can select that page in the "Quick select" combo box. This functionality relies on JavaScript.

Page descriptions

For every page selected from the overview, the thumbnail view or the quick selector you get a verbose and well-formatted description with comments from the transcription file, a preview image if available and all transcriptions in basic EVA, grouped by text unit and transcriber.

This is the main part of my program, and it was not as easy to implement as I thought it before. There is nothing so simple that I can't do it wrong...

Extractor

This is a simple tool for extracting parts of the transcription for your own research. It is a web-based replacement for the command-line tools vtt and bitrans, but somewhat slower and not implementing every feature of these programs.

You can use it to extract transcriptions for your own research without learning a command line interface. It can create transcription files in the most common transcription formats: EVA, Currier, FSG, Bennet and Frogguy. Some kinds of analysis depends on the transcription scheme (e.g. word-length distribution), so do not use EVA for everything. But the other formats are generated from the basic EVA transcription, which may create errors.

If you want to compare a transcription to a real manuscript page, you can also extract the transcription in HTML format. To have really fun with the HTML file, you probably want to install the EVA Hand 1 font on your system. But be warned, the HTML is formatted in a large table, which is suboptimal for large transcription files.

Another funny thing in the conversion of the transcription to "pronouncable Voynicheese" - but not for serious analysis, please. A significant amount of information is lost. It is just one of my strange experiments, and a dead end.